My rewards came in the form of titles—Sardar Bahadur, then C.B.E., then a knighthood and nomination to the Council of States. I am not sure what Indian nationalists said about them behind my back, but after every award, they turned up in their hundreds to felicitate me with garlands. By now I was regarded as the main builder of New Delhi and often referred to as owner of half of the new city (which was untrue). I was by then living in a large double-storeyed house on Queensway which I had named as I had my earlier house on Jantar Mantar Road, Baikunth (paradise). Top nationalist leaders readily accepted my hospitality. There were times when Sapru, Jayakar and C.Rajagopalachari stayed with me. Gandhi who stayed in Birla House across the road from my new house on the one side and Jinnah who had a house on the other would walk over to discuss political problems while strolling in my rose-garden.

Now that I am an old man and have seen all there is worth seeing in life and India being ruled by Indians, the new generation asks me tauntingly, ‘What did you get out of a lifetime of licking the boots of the British?’

I am not a man of great learning nor have I read many history books. What I say in reply comes from the heart based on what I have seen with my own eyes, experienced of my own countrymen and the few Englishmen I have known. I have seen the city I helped to build and which Lutyens designed for two centuries ruined in twenty years. We built magnificent buildings which will last for many centuries; they build shapeless, multi-storeyed offices and jerry-houses wherever there is open space and have smothered hundreds of ancient monuments behind bazaars and markets. We laid wide roads; they make narrow lanes on which two cars cannot pass each other. We planted slow-growing, long-living trees which will give shade to our great-grandchildren and their great-grandchildren. They plant quick-growing gul mohars and laburnums which blossom for a fortnight or two and yield neither fruit nor shade. All they want is something to show in the shortest possible time. They have no sense of the past or the future. As for licking British boots, I tell them that if I was given the choice of being born in any period of Indian history I liked, I would not choose the Hindu or the Muslim—not even the short period of Sikh dominance in the north—but the British. I would re-live my days as a builder-contractor under the British Raj.

‘Have you no pride in being an Indian?’ they sneer. ‘Have you no sense of shame praising alien rulers who exploited and humiliated us for over a hundred years? Have you forgotten what they they did to your forefathers after the First War of Independence of 1857? Have you in your generosity forgiven them the massacre of innocents at Jallianwala Bagh in 1919? And the hangings, tortures and imprisonment of thousands upon thousands of freedom fighters?’